


it's an institute you can't disparage

by shortcrust



Category: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (TV 2016)
Genre: Canon-Typical Depictions of Illness, Case Fic, Character Study, Fluff, Gen, M/M, Marriage Proposal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-18
Updated: 2018-03-18
Packaged: 2019-04-04 09:18:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14017116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shortcrust/pseuds/shortcrust
Summary: Todd wakes up beside Dirk Gently four years to the day after having met him realises - abruptly and with categoric certainty - that he wants to do so every day for the rest of his life.What the fuck, he thinks.





	it's an institute you can't disparage

 

 ****

 

 

 

Todd wakes up beside Dirk Gently four years to the day after having met him - an anniversary they were acknowledging but were not, as such, officially celebrating - and realizes abruptly and with categoric certainty that he wants to do so every day for the rest of his life.

 

The truth of this fact doesn't feel sudden in of itself. It feels sturdy in its rightness, like some inalienable pillar or foundation that you'd build a house around. A simple, honest necessity for existence. Dirk is in his life, and he belongs there, indefinitely. Todd's probably known this for ages somewhere in the back of his mind, he registers, like he knows things about the color of the sky, or how to tie his shoes, or what it feels like to travel in time or to see the very fabric of reality. It's just a fact, simple and plain. Something he, invariably, knows is truer than almost anything else in his life.

 

However, it's the absentminded yet wholly novel _registering_ of this fact that occurs on what was otherwise shaping up to have been a fairly normal morning.  

 

 _What the fuck_ , he thinks. Then -

 

“What the fuck,” he shouts, at the top of his lungs, sitting bolt upright in bed.

 

The mattress squeaks in alarm under the sudden shift in weight. Louder is the inarticulate sound of distress that emerges from the large ginger shape that’d been pillowing itself against Todd’s sternum. The shape moves, resolving itself into Dirk’s head, raised and face arranged in sleepy confusion. A hand emerges from under the pillow to gently touch the middle of his forehead, to which Todd’s shoulder had recently connected with not inconsiderable force.

 

“…Ouch?”

 

The comment is almost phrased like a question, like this isn’t a wholly startling event, and he’s trusting Todd for confirmation on how to react. Dirk’s skin along Todd’s side is sleep-warm and soft.

 

It's quite a lot to deal with, all at once.

 

“Shit, _shit_ , sorry.”

 

Dirk flops his cheek down against the pillow with a huff, head falling between his shoulder blades. They’re surprisingly broad, pale and dotted with freckles. Somewhere in his lizard-brain, Todd thinks about how he’d like to lick them.

 

Instead, he scrambles out of bed. His foot gets caught in the covers and he is forced to hop in place, awkwardly, for a second. Simultaneously, he reaches for the inside-out pair of jeans on the floor. He fails at both, hitting the floor with his knees accompanied by a squeaked yelp and a solid thunk. Dirk makes a noise of concern behind him, but Todd stutters-

 

“Fine! I’m fine! Everything fine, it’s. I’m fine.” He’s hopping again, legs into pants, arms through another discarded article of clothing - first he can grab - a sweater, definitely Dirk’s, long in the arms, smelling faintly of hair clay and sweat.

 

“No. _Go!_ I mean, I gotta go. Um, to - aaah. Aaaaa-aaamanda. Yes, Amanda. That’s where I’m going. To see Amanda. Late, very late.”

 

“- Wha?”

 

Todd turns halfway towards the door, spins on his bare heel to see Dirk. He’s where Todd left him twenty seconds ago, flopped on his front, cover pooling across his back. The weak morning sun is fighting through the old sash windows to paint him in dappled light, patches of auburn reflecting copper-gold in his hair. Todd kind of wants to die right there.

 

“Gottago _loveyoubye_ ,” he shouts behind him, as he bodily throws himself out the bedroom.

 

 

 

**-**

 

 

 

He does, in fact, go see Amanda.

 

Because, well.

 

 _Amanda_.

 

She’s less than thrilled - though not, of course, about his epiphany, she explains.

 

“More about the timing. Couldn’t you have waited, like, a few more hours? Until the decent brunch places are open?”

 

Todd, whose brain is still in the process of a soft reset but has at least regained a small majority of its vital functions, replies, “I have brought you to a breakfast buffet. You’re literally eating breakfast right now.”

 

“Brunch, not breakfast.”

 

“Is the timing the only difference?”

 

“Nah,” she says around a mouthful of scrambled eggs and maple syrup. She then gestures broadly with her knife, spraying crumbs. “Atmosphere.”

 

Amanda leads the Rowdies in a constant looping spiral with Seattle at its permanent epicenter. They cut through vast swathes of the Pacific Northwest, up into British Columbia, drawing lazy concentric circles around the city. There's a multitude of reasons for this; the primary one being that, more often than not, all roads lead to Dirk and inevitably anyone he knows is liable to be roped into some convoluted scheme at a moment’s notice. They accept this with about as much grace as you might expect. Furthermore, her continuing one woman mission to make living in a van with five other people feel marginally less like living in a van with five other people often draws them back so she can avail herself of a familiar shower and a moderately less craptastic bed.

 

Joyously, she also just seems to enjoy being able to drop in and bother Todd whenever she feels like it.

 

There’s a beat in the conversation while she loads another piece of toast, and left only to grapple with the vast expanses of his mind he distantly feels himself slip backwards into a mild panic attack.

 

Amanda wordlessly passes him her mimosa. “Thanks,” he says a moment later, half-gasping after knocking it back like a shot. He offers her the empty glass back. She wrinkles her nose.

 

“So. You want to get married.”

 

Said like that, it doesn’t sound so monumental. Sounds like a regular thing that regular people do with their regular partners.

 

He nods in acknowledgement. After a beat, he clarifies, because it seems important, "I want to marry Dirk.” _See_ , he thinks. _That sounds better. Or worse. Or-_

 

Amanda doesn’t even look up from her plate when she says, mildly, “Stop freaking out.”

 

“ _I’m not freaking out_ ,” he hisses, in a freaked-out sort of way.

 

"Forgive my ignorance," Amanda asks nonchalantly a moment later, delivering him a flat look. "But what's the big deal? I mean, I know what the big deal is, don't get me wrong, you have the emotional range of a tablespoon. But, like - you've been together for years. What's the issue?"

 

Todd tries to let the energy drain away. For the first time since he woke up this morning, Todd spares a split second to take an inventory, and lets everything go still, some force like gravity letting the dust settle while the more important things slowly rise to the surface. "I just -," he starts, then stops again. His tongue feels heavy. Todd doesn't say what he's thinking, which is a litany of questions like, _what if it's too soon,_ or _, what if Dirk doesn't want this. What if he doesn't want to be tied to the first person he ever ran into through sheer dumb luck. What if he realizes he can do better,_ or _, what if he doesn't. What if this stops him getting everything he deserves. What if he just settles with me because I'm there, and I asked, and this is just yet one more selfish thing in the Todd Brotzman patented line of dick moves._

 

Instead, he just says, helplessly, "I just want it to be the right thing to do, you know?"

 

"And _I_ want for you to be happy, you asshole." She grins at him, fond and open. "If this'll make you happy, I'm behind you. For better or worse.”

 

He whines high in the back of his throat, again, like a coward. Amanda drops her cutlery, suddenly serious.

 

“For fuck's sake, pull your head out of your ass, dude!” She throws her hands down on the table, and faces him straight on. “Stop projecting. Dirk's a grown man, not to mention he's, you know, _Dirk_. The world leads him where he needs to go, right? And it led him to you." She seems to realize she's being overtly soft and sincere, so she conjures a pantomime scowl, then adds, "For some reason."

 

Something inside Todd’s chest feels sort of fizzy. Like he’s got indigestion, but it’s made of electricity. It might be the mimosa.

 

“I’m going to marry Dirk,” he says out loud, declarative, like an affirmation.

 

The moment hangs, warm and bloated and happy in the air.

 

“Not very punk of you.”

 

Todd pitches a slice of bacon at her face.

 

 

 

**-**

 

 

 

Todd returns from the diner with a full stomach and a tangentially better grip on reality than he did when he left.

 

"I brought you pancakes," he announces. He illustrates this statement by holding up a brown paper takeout bag. Dirk, who had been sat at the kitchen bar casually scrolling through his phone, swivels on his chair and beams.

 

"Top-notch assisting, Todd. Assistant-ing. Assistance? The behavior of one who assists."

 

Todd smiles as he sheds his coat and shoes at the door, and pads over in his socks, mindful of slipping on the hardwood. “Since it's a Saturday, I'm off the clock, making this technically pro bono. So I'll take that overtime, please. And I thought you promoted me? My business card says 'partner' and everything."

 

"You are, of course, my partner in all things," Dirk says, sagely, nodding. "That being said, 'partnering' has different connotations I would perhaps not like to encourage while we are in the immediate vicinity of food I intend to eat.”

 

Setting down the paper bag, Todd comes to stand between the vee of Dirk's legs.

 

"That's not what you said that one time in the oyster bar with the grenade launcher and the murdery ballerina." He loops his arms around Dirk's neck.

 

Dirk whines, petulant. His hands come up reflexively to rest above Todd's hips. "Unfair - that was a highly stressful situation and you promised you wouldn't hold it against me."

 

Todd smiles, fond. He leans his forehead forward, bumping Dirk's as they meet in the middle.

 

"There's a joke about 'holding things against you' in there somewhere, but it's 9:30am and I've had three mimosas, so please just fill in the blanks yourself."

 

Dirk briefly sticks out his tongue. "Well, there is a joke about 'filling in the blanks' in there somewhere-"

 

Todd lets out a bright bark of laughter, and ducks in to peck Dirk on the edge of his mouth. His lips are a soft pressure, the skin a little chapped. Dirk hums, pleased.

 

Todd pulls back. He smiles, fond. "Hi. Good morning."

 

"'Hi' yourself," Dirk replies. "Nice brunch? How's Amanda?"

 

"It was breakfast, apparently. Or so I've been told," Todd corrects. "And she's good. Still as happy as ever, which is pretty much about as far as I like to pry, to be honest. Got a wicked faded undercut now.”

 

"Oh, is that why she's in town?" She and Dirk go to the same hairdresser. It's a whole thing.

 

"Nah. I think the Rowdies are tracking someone? But apparently the signal-scent thing that they follow is weird, and keeps blipping out and throwing them off course.“ Todd is endlessly fascinated by the machinations of the motley assortment of punks that his sister lives in a ruined old van with, but understands that given to certain unique histories everyone might not share quite the same sentiment. As anticipated, Dirk merely wrinkles his nose in response, and changes topic.

 

“Did you two talk about anything nice?"

 

“You," he admits. Dirk's a detective, so Todd thinks that, this time, valor is the better part of discretion.

 

There’s a bemused expression on Dirk's face, unguarded, which hides that one tiny shade of wonder that Todd always covets so fiercely. Hoards every sight of it close somewhere deep and selfish inside his ribcage, dragon claws wrapped tight around it, and thinks _that's for me._

 

He pinches Todd's side. "Move your bum. I've got pancakes to investigate."

 

 

 

**-**

 

 

 

Perhaps the most problematic thing about being in love, Todd came to the conclusion a decent while ago, is that it turns you into a fucking imbecile.

 

It's difficult to be objective sometimes, because at some point he acquired a terrible tendency to find everything about Dirk endearing, even the incorrigibly stupid stuff. Things that'd annoy him in someone else barely phase him, and things which otherwise wouldn't register now lodge themselves firmly in his subconscious and deep in the cockles of his useless heart. Todd once actually caught himself in the middle of fondly daydreaming about the dumb way Dirk eats a Snickers, turning the bar on its side and eating the caramel as a discrete layer before touching the nougat. It's a problem. That said, this doesn't necessarily mean that the things that Dirk does that _do_ annoy him are any less annoying, or frustrating, or rage inducing. In fact, it typically means they're more so, because he knows that at the end of the day, he's still going to be goddamn pathetic about this moron, so he can't even get that mad about it, as long as they're still alive by that point.

 

Which, honestly, isn't looking likely.

 

"Dirk-" his voice comes out strained, and cuts off suddenly when his grip slips. There's a split second where he feels the breath leave his body in a moment of weightless dread before he huffs again, hoists his shoulders up and strengthens his hold. He gasps at the strain, the muscles in his arms roaring with tension, then croaks, "Dirk, I can't hold this much longer."

 

'This' being his and Dirk's combined body weight, from where they're hanging in an elevator shaft.

 

"Please tell me you have a plan!" Todd calls, voice reverberating metallic as it echoes down the chamber below their feet. There's a beat of silence, somewhere under the rushing of blood through his ears. He shouts again, accusatory. " _Dirk_!"

 

"I don't have a plan, so I wasn't going to say anything!" Despite the circumstances, Dirk manages to sound put out.

 

He groans, and the muscles in his upper arms do the same, the ache starting to build once again. Plus, though it ranks relatively low on his current list of problems, his left foot is beginning to get cold. When they were first struggling to find a sustainable position, Dirk had grabbed a hold of and accidentally dislodged his shoe. Hearing it drop to the bottom was like releasing a penny into a very deep, very lethal wishing well. Todd thinks about the solid sound it had made upon connecting with the ground, and then tries to wedge his fingers deeper into the groove behind where the doors slide past each other. The position they'd eventually settled on was Todd essentially planking across the lip of the door to the eighth floor, arms crossed as if he'd just calmly swum up to the the edge of a swimming pool, and not, in Dirk's delightfully concise summary of the situation, an awful dangling death tube.

 

Dirk was currently wrapped around his lower legs, like a child's depiction of a monkey in a tree.

 

They'd been following a lead - half based on the logical investigative progress of the case, half based on Dirk just feeling like they probably should - and had merrily been poking around a storage container when they found themselves falling, significantly less merrily, here.

 

Out of the echoing quiet there's an awful wrenching sound, like metal shearing, and Todd immediately whips his head around to figure out where it's coming from. The elevator cables and the winch mechanism hang still and quiet, but they must be under significant strain. Todd remembers Amanda telling him about that one Mythbusters episode where they see if people can get cut in half with snapping steel cable.

 

The noise grows louder with a sudden _thunk_ directly above their heads, and Todd can feel Dirk curl his fingers tighter into the fabric of Todd's pants. He starts to say, voice raw, "Todd, I -" when suddenly the shaft fills with blinding white light. Todd desperately blinks against it. For a brief moment, he wonders if he's died. Heaven feels an awful lot like hanging in an elevator shaft. Then he looks up. He sees shoes, and looks up further. Silhouetted against the glowing hallway lights is Farah, brandishing a crowbar in her hand and with a nervous looking security guard standing at her back.

 

Todd feels Dirk's forehead thunk into his ass, shoulders collapsing in relief. "Oh thank God," he breathes out quickly.

 

By the time they explain a carefully sanitized version of the situation to the security guard Farah had strong armed from the front desk into helping rescue them, Todd's heart rate has almost returned to normal, though he doubts he'll ever be able to say the same of his arms. They’re escorted down the stairs, through a sparkling marble hallway, and out the building’s wide glass entrance. The night guard, suspicious but looking significantly more interested in just being shot of them at this point, walks them out and deposits them on the front step before conspicuously locking the door behind himself.

 

The night air is cool, a breeze coming in from the bay. They're in some sort of trendy shopping arcade, pitched in manicured grounds by the waterside where he can see the moonlit shape of a railing and a small mooring of expensive-looking boats. Across the water the Space Needle is visible, illuminated in the distance, which is weird, considering they were at least fifty miles outside of Seattle about an hour ago. Farah doesn't even look surprised, is the worst thing. ”Do I _want_ to know how you ended up in the elevator shaft of a high-rise office block at 2am?" She just sounds resigned at this point.

 

Todd makes a single salient contribution to the proceedings by offering, "Wormhole," with an affected shrug.

 

“How did you find us - Farah, do you have a _tracking_ device on me?" Dirk’s voice goes high in the middle.

 

“Yes. It's called Find My iPhone.”

 

Dirk flushes. "Ah. Carry on.”

 

"Have you considered changing your password? It's a little embarrassing."

 

"I think that's _quite enough_ , thank you, Farah," Dirk says quickly, looking at Farah's dry expression. Then his face wobbles, and goes all earnest. "Although, genuinely, thank you." He looks at Farah with wide eyes, shakes his head a little. "I very much did not appreciate hanging there indefinitely, impressive though Todd's upper body strength was." He pinches Todd’s bicep, and he yelps manfully.

 

Farah looks like she's taking it all in her stride, and with the exception of the fact that she has flannel pyjama bottoms rather than skinny jeans tucked into her boots, barely at all like they probably pulled her out of bed for this rescue mission. "Can you at least tell me you found something?"

 

"Oh yes!" Dirk brightens. "The whirly-light transport tube -“

 

“Wormhole,” Todd offers again.

 

“- the _wormhole,_ then, thank you, Todd, is obviously how they got in and out of the vault without triggering the alarm. But how could the mastermind - or mastermind _s_ , plural, potentially - control it? Which leads me to think it must stem from a singular location before spitting you out somewhere within a certain radius, or else there’s no _way_ we’d have ended up in Seattle. Statistically speaking. But we’re nowhere near the bank. So there must be, _oh,_ ooh ooh ooh, yes - a - a _thing_ , an object that controls it, _yes_!”

 

Farah looks interested, but also looks to be aggressively squeezing her eyes closed, as if searching for strength.

 

“The object has to be something that was in the vault in the bank, and then was also somewhere in or around where we previously were in Washington’s largest self storage facility, the latter of which, I acknowledge, might be a tad more tricky to narrow down, but I'm sure we'll get there in the end. But when we find whatever that could possibly be, we find the answer. Possibly. We're just _so_ close, I just know it! Let's go!” He spins on his heel and begins to bound down the building's front steps. Being comprised of a higher proportion of leg than the average person, he crosses the distance easily, leaving Todd and Farah trailing in his wake.

 

"Or, counter argument - we all go to bed, and pick this up in the morning." Todd thinks he has a point. It's technically tomorrow already, he's probably still got a statistically significant blood-adrenaline percentage, and there's a puddle slowly absorbing into his sock.

 

He wiggles his toes, and feels them squelch.

 

"- and then after _that_ we'll find the missing money, and then the very valuable marble bust of Oscar Wilde, and then we’ve done it! Case closed." Dirk is still going, voice excited and earnest. He seems to be avoiding considering this very reasonable request. "Darling, look, we just need -"

 

Todd is a sucker when it comes to Dirk's most sentimental, most British of pet names. Dirk knows this, and is consequently probably giving his best attempt at distracting Todd from how mad he is. One of his favorite pair of shoes is sitting at the bottom of an eight-story drop right now, though, so it doesn't quite work this time.

 

"No!" Todd cuts him off and waves a finger up in Dirk's face. "No, no you do _not_ get to 'darling' me right now, Dirk! We nearly died!"

 

Dirk's face falls, like Todd just kicked his puppy. Todd feels mildly victorious.

 

"We hardly ever _actually_ die, though, Todd. In fact, barely at all, recently."

 

Farah breaks her stony silence to groan, long and loud.

 

 

 

**-**

 

 

 

Later, safe on solid ground and just as the sun starts peaking above the horizon, Dirk is carding his fingers through Todd's hair, blunt nails familiar across his scalp, before his hands rest to cradle the base of Todd's skull. Thumbs come around to cup his jaw, rubbing soft circles while he reverentially whispers, over and over, " _yes_ , darling," the endearment a breath ghosting across his skin from only half an inch away.

 

He doesn't complain, this time.

 

 

 

**-**

 

 

 

Todd, despite what the therapist he saw that one time and Amanda may both imply, does in fact have a life outside Dirk. True, most of these events and connections are still between tangentially and moderately related to Dirk. But sometimes that's just how it goes when you live a depressing existence centered around a joyless job as penance for the mistakes of your past and then the physical manifestation of a debatably psychic sunflower arrives from the future and turns everything on its head.

 

So he has a life. He watches movies. He plays his guitar and goes to open mic nights and has started writing music again. He skypes Tina, where they talk excitedly about being bi and whatever weird indie bands they've heard recently. He goes jogging with the guy in the apartment across the hall, because his workday regularly involves running for his life, now, and his cardio needs work. He and Farah go for coffee.

 

He and Farah are going for coffee.

 

Farah, for all that she is their generous benefactor and the sole source of their remarkable financial solvency, isn’t actually involved in the day-to-day running of the Agency all that much. They aren’t shy of calling on her when in need of some backup, be it firearm-based or as a theoretical sounding board, and, inevitably, she does end up saving their asses on a weekly basis. But for the most part she likes to maintain a professional distance. All the better to enjoy their friendship, she claims, when she’s not busy being terrified for their lives in every spare waking moment.

 

They’re in a local, independent place that uses ethically sourced beans and doesn’t give out single-use cups. While he waits for Farah to return to their table, Todd has a vivid flashback to straight-up eating handfuls of freeze dried coffee grounds in his college dorm room, and marvels distantly at the strange turns his life has taken to reach this moment.

 

In the pocket of his jeans, his phone buzzes staccato. He pulls it out.

 

_TODD what is the smoking point of vegetable oil? I'm absolutely not asking for any specific reason_

 

A moment later it buzzes again.

 

_Don't worry! I found out!! Everything’s fine!!_

 

Then again, immediately after.

 

_Entirely unrelated question: where does one buy a new fire blanket_

 

Someone else might find this behavior to be concerning or annoying. Todd, who is quite extravagantly in love with Dirk, instead just screenshots the conversation.  

 

A mug appears out of his peripheral vision, plonking down on the table with a solid thud, and he pockets his phone before eagerly wrapping his hands around it. Warmth seeps into his fingers. The rapidly encroaching fall weather isn’t treating him well.

 

"Thank you for this," he says, saluting with the cup.

 

"Next time's on you," she replies, raising her own before taking a bite of the custard Danish resting at her elbow. "So what's up?"

 

Todd makes an enquiring sound around the rim of his cup.

 

Farah elaborates. "It was my turn to pick this time, I was gonna text you this weekend. It's a routine, and you know how I feel about routines. What gives?"

 

He didn't even realize he'd screwed their schedule, taking turns to invite one another out to different coffee shops in a quiet, two person rebellion against both Dirk's incessant tea consumption, and Seattle's proud Starbuckian heritage. In reality, he'd sort of just wanted to take his mind off the proposal-adjacent drain hole it'd been circling for the last few weeks, in between the banal everyday life affirming terrors. Todd tries to make a conscious and sincere effort to avoid shouldering his black female friend with all of his white guy angst and the dusty rubble piles of his emotional labor. The alternative to this is a heady cocktail of repression and self-critical hyperawareness, which is at this point a weirdly comforting territory to fall back on, to be honest.

 

So he tries for casual. "Everything's fine," he assures.

 

She squints at him, eyes narrowing. "You're acting squirrely, Brotzman."

 

"And you're acting suspicious, Black," he replies, because denial has historically always been a great way to avoid scrutiny.

 

"Do you mean that I am acting suspiciously, or that I am being a suspicious person?"

 

Todd gestures with his cup, the chocolate swirl on top succumbing to a small coffee wave. "The second one."

 

Snorting into her foam, Farah adds, "Circumstances depending, I'm often the first one, too."

 

"Eh," he offers, and then they say together, in practiced, monotone unison, "Occupational hazard."

 

They laugh. Todd reaches for his own pastry, an attractively glazed bear claw, and bites into it with gusto. After swallowing, and attempting to avoid coughing up a lung alongside a cloud of sugar, he reminisces. "Remember when we were doing all the paperwork, when we first set up shop, and we had to do office risk assessments?" The rating you give a work activity on a risk assessment matrix is meant to be based on the severity of the risk inherent in doing the thing, relative to its likelihood of actually happening. The process highlighted a unique phenomenon that their flavor of detective work entails.

 

"God, yeah, that was a trip. 'So, minimal risk of it happening, but it'd be probably be super bad if a bunch of crazy people in a van decide to snap and kill us.' Or, alternatively, 'there's a good chance we'll get sucked into some alternative dimension but, eh, that's not worked out too bad for us so far.'"

 

"Didn't you do your own one, because you claimed that you fell into some higher sort of risk category than the rest of us?"

 

Farah holds up her hands, defensive. "Hey, back then I was always first through the door, slice the pie, battering ram, all that stuff."

 

"You still are! Just, now you also delegate."

 

"I mean, I'm still not entirely comfortable with _you_ having a gun." Todd lets out an affronted ' _hey!_ ' and she smiles. "But even so, I'm still the one people seem to end up pointing theirs at. And then giving ultimatums. Or one liners. _'You don't have the guts to pull the trigger_ '," Farah mimes, putting on a gravelly, action movie protagonist voice. "Why do people always say that? You don't know me, I might've had a bad day."

 

"You might not like their shirt." He wonders what kind of stuff he used to reference before he met Dirk, because even when he's not in the room, in fact even when he's actively trying to avoid thinking about the situation, Todd can't help but seem to anecdotally highlight quite how wholly this man's life has infiltrated his own.

 

His face must be doing a thing. Farah gives him a side eye, and uses his momentary distraction to snag what remains of his pastry.

 

Todd decides to jump topic, in a roundabout way. At least it will look like he's jumping topic. In reality, he's decided just to commit to throwing himself headlong into the pit of despair he's been methodically circumnavigating. "Hey, can I ask you something?" Farah looks up from her new acquisition.

 

"You j -"

 

" - ust did, yes, thank you, Farah." She smiles with a closed mouth, flaky pastry around her lips, and wordlessly gestures for him to continue. He pulls in a deep breath. "Hypothetically. If you wanted to get something - to like, trade something to make something better - but it's already pretty good right now, would you risk it?"

 

Farah cocks her head, genuinely thoughtful. "Why would I not?"

 

He tries affect a shrug. "Say that you _do_ like things how they are. Really like them. It. And you're just scared to like, mess that up."

 

"Pretending for a moment that I still believe that this is an entirely hypothetical scenario, and that I'm not trying to figure out what exactly it is that you're up to; is what you have now going to categorically, utterly disappear if whatever this trade is doesn't work out?

 

Todd thinks of Dirk's small pleased smile whenever they trust his instincts, and his cheek on a pillow in their bed. "No," he says, with conviction.

 

Shrugging effortlessly, Farah says, "Then what's to lose? I'd have said that you're - hypothetically, of course - just too used to the status quo, and with things being comfortably being neat and tidy that you're unduly panicking about how it can all possibly get irreversibly disorganized.”

 

“Oh god,” says Todd, horrified, dropping his mug down into its saucer. “I’m turning into you.”

 

She pops the rest of Todd's pastry into her mouth, victoriously. "One should be so lucky.”

 

 

 

**-**

 

 

 

So - look, okay. Todd's been through a lot in the last few years, and his definition of what he could reasonably expect to encounter on a day-to-day basis without feeling the need to dub it 'weird' has expanded rather sizeably in recent history.

 

That being said, sometimes the whole holistic nature of the thing still manages to catch him off guard.

 

"Everybody off," calls the driver of the bus he'd been uneventfully sat on until forty seconds prior, to be met with a responding chorus of groans and brewing complaints from everyone on board. The man waves back blithely, preoccupied with the dash, which is lit up and blinking in response to the sizeable puff of smoke visibly rising from the bus' hood. "Next one'll be along in ten minutes."

 

So Todd shuffles into aisle, makes it through the forming queue of commuters and disgruntled shoppers, steps down from the stationary bus and out onto a mid-town sidewalk. Where he finds himself face to face with a jewelry store.

 

He blinks up at it. Looks around, nonsensically suspicious. Steps forward. Steps forward again.

 

Always where he needs to be. The universe has its favored son, and he's getting an engagement ring, it seems.

 

Todd steels his stomach, and pushes through the door.

 

It's a smaller place than he was expecting from the signage out front, with low ceilings that suggest an old shell building with a grand history. On the inside, however, the layout is just as sleek as any other jewelry store he's ever seen. There's a permissive, eerie fluorescent glow from countless lights hidden inside polished plate glass cabinets.

 

Todd bends to look at the cabinet nearest the door. Everything is very shiny, covered in diamonds and rubies and labelled with shapes and cuts and carats.

 

The physical and spiritual enormity of the thing he's about to do suddenly becomes intimidatingly apparent.

 

"Hiya."

 

Todd compartmentalizes this latest revelation and looks up, the salesperson stepping up behind the counter he'd been staring into. She looks a bit crunchy granola, with a scrunchie in her mop of blonde hair and a worn green knit cardigan thrown over the top of her uniform and embellished with a multitude of pins and patches. The one labelling her 'Dani' seems almost tacked on as an afterthought.

 

"Err. Hi."

 

Dani smiles. It looks genuine. Todd, though now years out from his time at the Perriman Grand, remembers customer service vividly and is suddenly deeply grateful that the universe dropped him into this particular version of this particular nightmare scenario.

 

"What can I do you for?"

 

"I'm - looking for an engagement ring."

 

“Oh, awesome! Congrats, dude!" If anything, Dani's smile goes wider. She has a little gap between her front teeth. "Engagements are the best. Girl, guy, enby?"

 

Todd blinks at her. So, _so_ grateful.

 

"Guy."

 

"Double awesome!"

 

Dani suddenly disappears. She bounces up from behind the counter again a moment later, brandishing an old cookie tin full of off-brand Halloween suckers wrapped in clear plastic. She rattles it towards him. Her bracelets jangle. "Take one. My girl Aubrey" - she punctuates the statement by using her other hand to tap the pins on her cardigan, two of them striped in pink-purple-blue and blue-pink-white - "gave me these for nervous looking gays. Gotta stick together."

 

At a loss for what else to do in this situation, Todd reaches in and takes a yellow lollipop.

 

Dani pops one into her mouth, too. "So what're you looking for? What kinda thing?" Her words sound hissed and kind of spit-y around the candy.

 

"I dunno," Todd replies honestly, his voice probably coming out the same.

 

Dani shrugs easily. "That's cool. There's no rules, just gotta go with what feels right."

 

She talks him through a few popular style options, at a couple of different price points. There are a few he points to - bands pipped with bright colored stones, or ones with layers of different metals - that Dani pulls out for him to hold. They're very nice. Objectively, they are all very nice pieces of jewelry.

 

None of them, though, none of them -

 

"They don't feel right," Todd says numbly, parroting Dani's earlier words back to her when she floats over. She'd given him some space to think, and all he's managed to do is manage to confuse himself more. _Isn't it supposed to be easier than this? Doesn't stuff just come to Dirk leaf in the stream style, complicated backstory floating along behind afterwards?_

 

Todd ponders that for another half a second, then decides to grab the bull by the horn. Or the rhino, maybe. Metaphors are disturbingly literal for him now.

 

"This might sound - strange. But do you have any rings that are. Like. Weird?"

 

Dani pauses, then gives an almost exaggerated performance of racking her brain, her fingers resting on her chin. "You know," she says, thoughtfully, "it's kind of a coincidence you'd ask today."

 

Unsurprised, Todd mutters under his breath. "Ain't it just."

 

Either Dani doesn't notice, or she doesn't care to notice, because she twirls away. There's a door behind her, marked ' _Staff Only_ ', that pushes open with a creak.

 

She talks over her shoulder, voice muffled by the distance. "We trade in antique jewelry as well, you know? It's a family business thing, we do valuations and sell people's speciality stuff that the big name stores don't. Anyway, we - ahah!"

 

With a proud flourish, she returns to set a flat, square leather box on the counter between them. Carefully, she pries open the lid revealing the inside, lined with plush fabric, and arranged into little divots and trays to cradle various kinds of items. There's a brass-y looking pocket watch, some bangles with twisting filigree, and half a dozen rings in neat little rows. They visibly range in style and age, but Dani motions to two, identical rings sitting cheerily beside one another.

 

"We got these in this morning. Both of them, but from completely different people. One was an estate sale, don't know the story there, sorry - but I think the other was an older lady? She said she bought hers in the 60s, but the hallmarks on them are _way_ older than that. And they're totally bizarre."

 

Dani keeps talking, launching into this _pretty_ _weird story, right,_ but Todd tunes her out. Carefully, he plucks out one of the rings from between the box's little waves of dark velvet and rolls it between his fingers.

 

It's delicate and small, but the band isn't thin - instead it seems wide, because it sits at an angle, and holds three rounded stones in little silver claws. Either side of the stones are curled flowers, or maybe leaves, or maybe just abstract shapes, studded with little white gems inside too, small enough not to shimmer but just nestle there, rose cut and shining. The inside of the ring is gold.

 

That feels notably significant, in some way.

 

Todd looks down to the other in the box. They're a perfect matched set, both busy and sparkling. From disparate, distant histories but here in Todd's hands all the same.

 

"Dani?"

 

"- but see 15 carat gold normally means something was made before the 1930s, like, that was the standard back them. But that was only -"

 

" _Dani_."

 

" - in British markets, so I've got no clue how it ended up on these. Like, that's a total mystery. So I was thinking -"

 

He taps her arm. She stops abruptly, startled, before her face crumples in embarrassment. Luckily, Todd has a soft spot for passionate people rambling about mysteries. The ring sits, weighty, in his palm.

 

He smiles.

 

"I'll take them."

 

 

 

**-**

 

 

 

Todd is reading the note Dani had carefully added into the bag for him, containing everything she knew about the rings' history in the event Dirk wanted to take a stab at their own little case, when Farah walks into the office. Todd utilizes the second and a half she takes to turn and close the door behind herself to desperately stuff the bag and note behind the couch cushions.

 

He still hasn't told Farah - or anyone really, aside from Amanda because, again, _Amanda_ \- about his plan. Or, rather, his lack thereof. This is even though he recognises that she'd likely have sensible advice to offer him, or at the very least the ability to kick him sharply in the shin when she deems it necessary.

 

But it feels a little wrong, somehow. Like this is Todd's private epiphany, and their - _Dirk's_ \- theoretically special moment.

 

Still. From all the _Cosmopolitan_ articles he’s read in the last month, not to mention pretty much every scrap of romance-adjacent pop culture he’s ever absorbed throughout his life, Todd knows that an important part of pre-proposal prep is to ask someone’s permission. This, Todd reflects, has some pretty uncomfy connotations of patriarchy and ownership, both in the traditional sense but also in this specific case.

 

There aren't many scraps of Dirk's history left. This isn't wholly a bad thing, in Todd's opinion. There's an open sore somewhere in his brain, the one shaped like Blackwing and Riggins and the rest of the CIA fucks, that he pokes when he's feeling particularly vindictive and murdery. He's not at the minute, so he leaves it be. That's not even in the discussion.

 

Beyond it, there's not much else that racking his brain provides. He could reach out to the distant family on his mother's side that Dirk had tracked down a few years back, but that doesn't exactly have an awful lot of meaning.  _Cosmopolitan_ assures him that the sentiment is the point of the thing. So it has to be someone from Dirk's past, who knows him now, who Todd also knows, and who he feels like maybe has a right to know. There aren't a lot of people in the middle of that Venn diagram, and they aren't particularly easy to reach. Mona flits in and out every six months or so, never staying longer than a day or two and always leaving a gift from some far flung place that they’re never _entirely_ certain isn’t maybe still her, somehow. Hobbs calls punctually on Sunday afternoons for a debrief on all the latest cases, and still sends them a Christmas card every year. The Rowdies are, on the positive side, perhaps the most accessible, but leave something to be desired in terms of all the other qualities which would theoretically actually make this a touching gesture.

 

But, that aside, he’s kind of lacking in options.

 

He makes do.

 

Two days later, he's sat on the closed toilet seat in the locked bathroom of his apartment, which is pretty much the most covert location he could come up with, and hits a number in his contact list with what he deems an appropriate level of trepidation.

 

There's an international dial tone. It rings for a little while, before the line crackles open, and a voice crackles shortly after.

 

"'-lo?"

 

"Hi, Bart - it’s Todd.”

 

“‘ey Todd,” comes her familiar growling drawl. They don’t exactly do this often, so Todd was perhaps anticipating more surprise. But he also knows that not a lot surprises Bart any more. That tends to happen when the world grinds you down endlessly with its boot heel for approximately your entire lifespan.

 

“What are you up to?"

 

"Not much. Vacation." Somewhere in the distance, Todd thinks he hears screaming.

 

“Oh. You out seeing the sights?”

 

A huff of breath. “Something like that.”

 

"Nice, nice." God, Todd's an asshole, _why is he doing this._ He shuffles awkwardly on the seat. "Soooo. Bart. This is kind of a weird call but I wanted to tell- ask. No, yeah, tell you. Tell you something."

 

"Yea?"

 

"Right. Sure. Cool. Well, I think I'm going to ask Dirk if he wants to get married."

 

He says it quickly, and leaves it to hang there while he looks for meaning in the grout between the floor tiles. Bart doesn't respond at first, which probably isn't unusual, but she doesn't respond for long enough that if it weren't for the not insignificant volume of background noise he'd maybe assume that they got disconnected.

 

When she does talk, her gravely voice has an additional edge to it. He tries not to shiver at the sound.

 

"What's it to me?"

 

Todd wilts. "Nothing - wait, I mean, it's not nothing. Obviously. I just care about Dirk a lot and, you know, I thought that he might maybe want to get married. To me."

 

"Do _I_ care?" It might be a genuine question. Todd can't tell.

 

"You don't, maybe. I don't know. I - just. You're meant to ask someone's permission, when you want to marry a person? Right? Like a parent, or maybe a friend. It's kind of fucked up, actually-"

 

“Bye, Todd.”

 

“No, no, _no no no,_ ” he says, urgently, “Bart, please don’t hang up. Please.”

 

She doesn’t say anything. He pulls the phone away from his ear, sees the little stopwatch for the call still counting upwards. He takes a deep breath. In all likelihood, this piece probably isn't Todd's to say, but he's going to do it anyway.

 

"You're a part of this. This thing, with Dirk, and the others and - and you can be involved with that, if you want. I think. We’re here for you. Look - just, all the magazines and the films said I was meant to ask his family and you were basically the first person I thought of. So you totally don't have to care. But, like. You can. If you want to. Dirk'd probably like that. I'd like that," he ends kind of lamely, trailing off into a heavy silence.

 

The bathroom tap drips. After a pause, Bart asks.

 

"So is one of youse gonna wear a dress?"

 

"What - err, no? Maybe? Probably not. We're bot-"

 

She cuts in, tone thoughtful. "Can _I_ wear a dress?"

 

Todd is getting emotional whiplash. He nods, pointlessly. "Yeah. Yeah, that'd be nice."

 

There's a pause, when she softly says, "...huh."

 

And then she hangs up on him.

 

 

 

**-**

 

 

 

Thinking about asking Dirk to marry him has basically coalesced all of Todd's disparate anxieties into one single, writhing mass. On the plus side - he acknowledges, faintly - at least they're far easier to keep track of this way.

 

They still creep up on him at the most inopportune times, though.

 

Dirk swans into the office one afternoon after lunch with a client, steps bouncing and energetic. Todd looks up from his laptop, and tries to act like he didn't just close a tab entitled _15 Places You Won't Believe Someone_ _Has Proposed!_

 

Barrelling past him, Dirk wordlessly plucks the small rainbow flag from the pen pot on his desk - Captain Raymond Holt, an icon to us all - and sticks it behind his ear. He then spins to face Todd, jazz hands spread in the air with fingers wiggling, and looks at Todd challengingly, as if he himself instructed Dirk to do this.

 

" _So_ … the meeting went well, then?” Todd hazards asking.

 

Dirk nods, rapt. He doesn’t appear angry, in so much as he just seems to be feeling a lot of _something_ , bright and fizzy with it. Even with this much practice, Dirk can be difficult to get a read on. He’s like trying to describe a kaleidoscope but never getting to see all the colored fractals at once. “Mrs. O’Hare was ever so thankful that we recovered her diamonds, she paid us exactly what we agreed upon plus a little more for good measure. Thoughtful, really, what after all the stabbing. However, in addition, she also insisted that she simply _must_ set me up with her granddaughter.”

 

Todd winces. Dirk takes this for acknowledgement and, for emphasis, repeats the sentiment.

 

“Me, Todd! _Me_!”

 

Todd, as he is wont to do whenever an appropriate occasion emerges, becomes singularly anxious. Presently, this stems from the worry that Dirk is eventually going to tire of having to explain to clients and co-workers and servers at restaurants that he has a boyfriend. Only, worse, because at least boyfriend has some wiggle room, and could maybe be misinterpreted in the way that wine-drunk Facebook moms talk about getting together with their girlfriends. _Husband_ doesn’t exactly offer the same uncertainty.

 

Remembering that his sister very recently called him out for projecting, Todd pauses to faintly consider that this is a pretty fucked up anxiety to have on someone else’s behalf, and that he probably shouldn’t attempt to assume however it is Dirk might be feeling.

 

“Are you okay?”

 

“It’s not the telling people that bothers me, obviously, seeing as the sales pitch for the entire concept of my existence is a tad more difficult to parse. It’s the fact that I have to even _tell_ people at all!” Todd feels a trickle of tight stress climb up between his shoulder blades. The tension doesn’t really start to fall out until after Dirk charges on with his rant. “Now I appreciate that people don’t want to make assumptions, that’s understandable, but the alternative is hardly flattering either. I put so much effort into looking like the _Ab Fab_  costume department threw up on me, and this is the thanks I get?"

 

Todd’s confused. “People get confused,” he says diplomatically.

 

“Oh yes, I completely understand how she could have gotten the wrong end of the stick,” Dirk says, quick and sarcastic, “what with _the all of me_ being _right there._ ”

 

“In her defense,” Todd reasons slowly, “you’re pretty charming. Old ladies like that, right? You being a nice young gentleman might have just blindsided her.”

 

“I’ve been told I exude a ‘visceral gay energy’.”

 

Todd opens his mouth to offer a counter argument. Dirk soldiers on, cutting him off.

 

“By you. You told me that.”

 

Todd closes his mouth again. He can't fault his own logic. On the average day, Dirk has all the subtlety of a hand grenade. With a shrug, Todd finally offers, “Then I’ve got nothing. Maybe the jackets confused her, somehow. Like, leather jackets are manly, right?”

 

Dirk looks at him severely, like this is a legitimate slight. Todd can't help but smile. For all that he once described him as having both the typical hair colour and emotional range of an Irish Red Setter, Todd knows that Dirk can do serious when it matters. Calling him perceptive seems a tad redundant, but for all of his predilections towards wall-eyed gazing and kooky bullshit, Dirk has slowly gained a sense of surety in himself, in the part of him that seemed to crumble up back when they were first in Wendimore. Dirk has rarely appeared anything but truly, authentically himself, which is exhausting to even just witness. But he makes it look simple, as if being yourself is the easiest thing you can be, the lowest common denominator of your existence, and not something that most people have to fight like hell to choose over and over again every single day.

 

At this point, Todd reasons, it’s probably not his job to worry about how Dirk feels, apart from all the everyday occasions where that is an almost word-for-word quote from his job description.

 

"No straight man could own this jacket, Todd.” The little flag by Dirk’s ear flutters as if to punctuate the statement.

 

 

 

**-**

 

 

 

It’s a nice evening. The regularity of such things in Todd’s life is pleasant albeit still mildly surprising, he considers, as he wiggles his arm underneath the couch in desperate search of the remote. It’s the weekly Agency Shareholder’s Meeting, the agenda of which solely comprises of Farah coming over and the three of them catching up on trashy TV shows that she pretends to hate and that Dirk pretends to fail to grasp the premise of, while Todd gamely pretends that merely having these two people in his home and his life doesn’t immediately put this day on a higher plane of existence than quite literally any that he experienced for approximately an entire decade. There’s a lot of impressive acting going on, really, though none of it is on the screen. He reminds himself to look at the cost of getting three little plastic Oscars statues engraved.

 

Again - it’s a very, very nice evening. Or, it is, until that statement suddenly becomes past tense, and enough pain rips through Todd’s body that he cries out sharply and desperately tries to avoid biting clean through his tongue.

 

His sister is still fighting her own battles. Todd knows this and, _God_ , he'd sooner throw himself into traffic than invalidate everything she struggles with to this day. Half a decade's worth of debilitating agoraphobia and a generalized anxiety disorder doesn't just vanish overnight. He knows this. But, still. Something has to be said for the dichotomy that exists between the two them at times like this.

 

Amanda has four vampires that painlessly absorb the psychic energy directly from her body. Todd has a knife through his abdomen, Farah forcing a pill between his teeth, and Dirk rocking him while he screams and screams and watches his blood pool thickly onto the rug.

 

It's - he's dealing with it.

 

Luckily, today’s attack is not one of the sort that sticks and lingers while he shivers alone on the bathroom tiles for twenty minutes. Instead, the pain evaporates. There, then gone, leaving you reeling and lightheaded and gasping for breath. Cold, like he’d been doused in alcohol that’s all instantly burned off. The hand that’d been scrabbling at the gaping slash of the wound suddenly feels empty, nerve endings echoing raw and tingly. The other hand is still fisted tightly into the shoulder of Dirk’s shirt, pushing wrinkles into the crisp fabric, which he releases with reluctance.

 

He pulls away, suddenly oversensitive, and they move him to the couch. He draws up his legs and submits himself to being covered with soft furnishings.

 

Dirk folds himself onto the floor in front, cross-legged and peering up at him. He carefully rests his chin on Todd’s knee and offers him a gentle smile. Then he puffs out his cheeks a little and wiggles his head from side to side like a metronome, and looks pleased when it pulls a wet sounding blip of laughter from Todd’s throat.

 

When Todd speaks, his voice is hoarse. "Sorry," he croaks.

 

"I sincerely hope you've done something unforgivably horrible in the last few hours, to Farah or myself or possibly Mona, if she's here, somewhere. Else that means you're apologising for having an attack which, as I think we've been over quite thoroughly by this point, I disagree with in essentially every way that one can disagree with another person."

 

Todd tries to put on a sarcastic expression. He sniffles pathetically, which probably doesn't help sell the illusion. "Guilty as charged, detective."

 

"You've got nothing to be sorry for." Dirk's voice is frustratingly patient.

 

"I know that!“ Todd actually does. It required a substantial amount of emotional maturity to admit, the first time, and he's still rather proud. "It just doesn't, you know. Make it any easier when _this_ happens!" He waves his blanket arms, gesturing to the coffee table, which has been knocked aside, dashing its contents across the hardwood. They’ll be finding popcorn kernels in the carpet pile for years.

 

Dirk reaches out. He carefully picks out a shard of broken pottery from the wreckage. "Oh. My old Cambridge uni mug," he says, blankly. Todd's heart sinks. Then Dirk turns to him.

 

“I never could stand this one. Did you know that? Always hated it. Terrible thermal properties, loses heat like anyone's business. And the handle always digs into your palm, it was a _nightmare_. What a happy coincidence.”

 

The attack and his meds leave him feeling a little high, brain loopy and light. Without thinking, Todd reflexively replies, “Coinky-dink.” Dirk waggles his eyebrows suggestively, and Farah snorts. The tension that’d been sat heavy in the air breaks, leaving out the crack in the window with an almost audible _woosh._

 

“I’ll pop the kettle on,” says Dirk softly after a beat, levering his long legs off the ground. He runs his palm over Todd’s knee as he walks away, and Todd stares after him.

 

Farah notices.

 

“You’re looking sappier than normal,” she says. Her tone is careful but firm, so not particularly different to the norm. From underneath his blanket nest, Todd appreciates that she doesn’t treat him like a child. She knows better than to handle him with kid gloves.

 

“I - no I’m not.”

 

“Yes, you are.”

 

“No, I’m _not_.”

 

The kid gloves comment might have been inaccurate. “ _Yes_ , you _are._ ” Farah looks like she’s having fun. She casts her eyes around, spins a little with broad hand movements in a charming unconscious mimicry of Dirk.

 

“What oh what,” she ponders aloud, “could constitute Todd Brotzman becoming quite so doe-eyed and romantic about his boyfriend on the eve of this otherwise average Shareholder’s Meeting?”

 

“ _Farah…_ ” Todd warns.

 

"And what, pray tell, could cause Todd to abandon the coffee schedule we have carefully cultivated over these last few years?" She taps her fingers against her chin, deliberately broadcasting the movement. Then she strokes an imaginary moustache. "Could it be that, perhaps, something has come along and forced him to confront reality and accept that the depth of his affections exceeds that of a tablespoon?”

 

Todd likes to think that Farah might have figured it out because, after several years and numerous near-death experiences, she just knows him that well. Instead, she has a certain look in her eyes, and smiles in the generously indulgent way you might if someone you cared about was just really, really pathetic.

 

She makes a ponderous _hmmm_ sound aloud, then throws up her index finger, parodying enlightenment.

 

"Oh come on, Farah, knock it off," he whines.

 

She drops the finger, but levels him a look. Her right eyebrow twitches upwards.

 

“You’re a significantly better detective than I am, in literally every conceivable way. I'm pretty sure you’ve already figured it out.”

 

The eyebrow goes higher. He winces.

 

“ _Please_ don’t make me say it out loud.”

 

She doesn’t.

 

Instead, she lets out a high pitched squeal.

 

“Oh my _God_ , I _knew_ it, you’re going to _propose_ to _Dirk_!” Every other word is punctuated by a little victorious jabbing hand motion.

 

“ _Shhhhh_!” He holds out his hands, casting an anxious glance over his shoulder.

 

“Yeah, yeah, _shhhhh_ , _shhhh_ ,” repeats Farah, quietly, mimicking his motion. She then turns the gesture into a series of tiny little claps with her fingertips.

 

“Oh my god, everything makes so much sense now. This is what you were talking about the other week, right? See, I thought _maybe_ you were thinking about it when you moved into the new place here together, but when that didn’t happen I got confused, because you were so obviously nesting. Like, you bought all that new bedroom furniture and the weird wall art thing that Dirk likes and it just seemed like you were playing house! And then we got the Save The Date for Panto's wedding, somehow, remember, and we all started talking about marriage and I don't know, I was _convinced_ it was going to happen then. You just kept _looking_ at him. And I want to be a bridesmaid so bad, you have no idea, so I was really bummed. But now! It’s happening! Finally! Oh Todd, congratulations, I'm so _happy_ for the two of you! I have been _so_ ready for this!”

 

“Wait, what? You thought -"

 

She’s on a roll, now. “When are you going to do it? _Where_ are you going to do it? You should take him out for dinner, that’s a classic. I can help! I have the _Metropolitan Bistro_. I’ll book you out the whole floor - ooh, no, wait, I’ll put you in _The_ _Palomar_ instead. That’s got a super fancy atmosphere. There’s a chandelier.” Then, clearly taking in his walleyed look but apparently misinterpreting its cause, she reassuringly adds, "Don’t worry, it’s _very_ romantic."

 

Todd’s kind of not sure which part of that sentence to tackle first. He picks one at random.

 

“You own a restaurant now? _Multiple_ restaurants?!”

 

Farah looks up from her phone where, he assumes, she was tapping out a very demanding but religiously polite email to someone whom she pays a fantastic wage to manage an apparently very upscale restaurant and/or restaurants.

 

Sometimes, what with literally everything else in his life also currently existing in his life, Todd manages to forget that his best friend is a multimillionaire.

 

She shrugs. “I like to have a diversified portfolio.”

 

 

 

**-**

 

 

 

For her birthday last year, Todd got the brick that the Rowdies once threw through Amanda’s window professionally mounted in a small glass case, like the arc reactor in the first _Iron Man_ movie. In return, she then spent a hideous amount of time and money combing eBay before gifting him an equally hideous yak fur coat. They can laugh about this sort of stuff, now. This year, he’d tried to top it, and bought her six VIP tickets for the next _Sound Of Nothing_ , then decided to also take everyone they were intended for out and get them trashed for good measure.

 

It’s gone 2am by the time their Uber pulls up outside Todd and Dirk’s apartment building, parking a cautious distance behind the sketchy looking van also idling next to the sidewalk.

 

Todd steps out first, having been in the passenger seat, which gives him a wonderful vantage point from which to see everyone else extricating themselves from a tangled mess in the back. Watching the Rowdy 3 pile out is like watching a mass exodus from a clown car, if all the clowns were getting out to go to a grunge gig together. Beast still looks flawlessly put together, even though she has a bottle of confetti-cake-flavored vodka clutched firmly in one hand. Maybe she just doesn’t metabolize ethanol like the rest of the human race. Todd takes a particular pleasure in the way that Martin totters on his feet.

 

He hands off Amanda to Gripps, who doesn’t drink and who had tolerantly stayed behind, and turns to retrieve his boyfriend. He’s gone all floppy, like one of those little wooden puppet toys where you push the bottom up and they collapse, and is making Todd feel significantly more sober by direct comparison.

 

He’s not fighting Todd as he manoeuvres them inside, but he’s certainly not helping matters either. He keeps trying to hold Todd’s hand, though, which is nice.

 

There’s an elevator in the lobby, providing yet another opportunity for utter gratitude that they finally decided to move out of the Ridgely. He navigates it with caution. Todd eventually manages to get Dirk through their front door and, while he turns to lock it behind them, balances him between his own body and the wall in the same way one might try to stabilize a wobbly bag of grocery shopping.

 

Todd then deposits him carefully on their bed, peels off his jacket and shoes, and gives him a quick once over to make sure that he hasn’t harmed anything tonight with the exception of his dignity.

 

His eyes catch Dirk’s as they linger on the latter’s face. Sue him.

 

“You’re very pretty,” Dirk says sagely. He blinks, once and slowly, like it’s a conscious effort.

 

“And you’re very drunk. And biased.”

 

He heads for the bathroom, leaving Dirk to worm his way under the covers.

 

“But!” Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Dirk throw up a finger into the air, as if he’s a lawyer countering the prosecution with what is sure to be a winning argument. “I have eyes.”

 

“That you do.”

 

“You also have eyes.”

 

“I… thank you?”

 

“You’re welcome!” says Dirk, before adding, with authority, “They’re pretty.”

 

After half-heartedly running a toothbrush around his mouth for ten seconds, Todd returns, placing a fresh glass of water on Dirk’s bedside table. He remembers to move the Everbulb, which they use to find the way to the bathroom in the middle of the night, out of Dirk's potential line of fire. Then he strips, yawns, and crawls over the large cocooned obstacle already burritoed up in the blanket. He puts a respectful foot of distance between them, which Dirk immediately closes.

 

So he pulls Dirk under his arm. Dirk mumbles, sincere and sleepy and intoxicated. “Beauty is logarithmic on a base of 2.”

 

Todd smiles, drunk and equally dopey, looking at the crown of Dirk’s head.

 

Then he looks past them, to the dresser cast in shadows where it sits tucked into the corner of the room, and to the scary secret thing he hid inside it over a month ago, and falls asleep wondering if he’s ever going to stop being such a fucking coward.

 

 

 

**-**

 

 

 

Farah has taken to Snapchatting him the covers of bridal magazines whenever she goes past a newsstand, like some passive aggressive subliminal messaging campaign. She’s also gained the habit of leaving this one wedding cake topper that she found on his desk sometimes, which he has to bodily throw himself at in the mornings to intercept when he and Dirk walk in together. He’s really not particularly fond of this, a floating spectre of his upcoming heart attack blipping occasionally onto his push notifications or into his workplace. However, on the two occasions he’s tried to bring it up with her, on one she threw the book she’d been reading at him, and on the other she suddenly started sniffling and sheepishly held out her arms for a hug and explained that it’s been a few months since she’s seen Tina, okay, she’s sorry, she’s just a bit pent up. Todd remembers a time when he wasn’t getting regularly fucked by anything other than his life, and tries to be more forgiving.

 

But at this point even he acknowledges it’s been going on too long, and that he’s basically navigating through his life as per normal, only with a ring box stashed inside an old shoe, as he desperately tries to synthesize a cohesive plan in the same way that he watches Dirk sometimes stand aimlessly in front of the open fridge while visibly trying to transform the abstract concept _I should eat something_ into an actual course of action. It’s inactivity concocted from one part laziness, and one part abject terror of everything going terribly wrong so, you know, why even bother in the first place.

 

At one point Todd gains the self-awareness to realize that he is literally procrastinating his own proposal, and has to go lie down for a while.

 

So he’s waiting for a sign, for something in the universe to come and slap him upside his head and push him wholly and holistically into action. For an indication that this is the capital letters 'Right Time'. He’s waiting for the straw that maybe won’t break the camel’s back, but will at least piss it off enough to make it move. Maybe it’ll be something bold, some dramatic rescue caper, a heroic moment like at the climax of a movie, or the sweeping orchestral resolution that follows.

 

In the end, it’s not even that Todd really has an epiphany, because with one recent exception he has realized by this point that he’s not exactly the one out of the pair of them best suited to it. It’s nothing quite so grandiose. They’re just talking on the bus one day, a pair of headphones strung between them as they fire rapid quips back-and-forth about a recent adventure and all its laughable details, and when he swings his head over to watch one such joke land he sees Dirk gazing out the window, face folded into a soft smile, glowing unawares. He looks goddamn radiant. He looks like the sort of person who could pull you into a mad world of constant abject craziness, and you'd barely think twice about it. He looks like the sort of person you’d want to spend the rest of your life with. He looks at Todd curiously, mouth folded into a frown, and Todd realises he’s been staring in rapturous silence for several seconds.

 

Dirk frowns. "Do you want to skip this song?" They're listening to one of Dirk's playlists; not the ones that he and Todd have made for each other, but rather just a general selection of happy, pop-adjacent tracks that aren't generally Todd's thing but which suit Dirk immensely. Todd hadn't even really been processing what they were listening to, but when he does, he shrugs. He tends to hear something like _Accidentally In Love_ play in his brain most times he looks at Dirk anyway.

 

"No!" he assures. "No, no it's fine."

 

"Are you coming down with something?" Concern flashed across Dirk's features. He draws his bottom lip between his teeth as he reaches out to press a hand to Todd's forehead. Todd swats him away. "You need to tell me if you're feeling ill! I have a duty of care, as your employer not to mention as your everything else. Allow me to take care of you, I have a very nice recipe fo -"

 

"I am absolutely fine, Dirk, please don't make the soup. I could be laid up on my deathbed, dying of dysentery, and I'd use my last words as I leave this mortal coil to beg of you to please, _please_ not make the soup."

 

Dirk looks as if he's trying to frown, but can't quite make his face complete the movement. His hair is sticking up where it has been pressed against the window, he smells strongly of the office's new lemon air freshener, and Todd wants nothing more than to kiss him.

 

He leans over and does so.

 

"I love you," he says.

 

"I love you too," replies Dirk instantly. Todd tries to squash his heart back down inside his rib cage from where it had been trying to exit through his throat. Then Dirk seems to reflect on the previous exchange, and frowns. “… _Are_ you dying of dysentery?"

 

 

 

**-**

 

 

 

Once upon a time, Todd might have imagined that being soundly on the road to forty meant that you had your life together. As it stands, despite vast recent improvements, that is still a fairly laughable aspiration. He’s reasonably certain that the only reason he manages to make it through most days with all his limbs and organs in working order is because his little adopted family are all equally useless in fascinatingly complementary ways. He and Dirk take care of each other by small co-dependent turns. It’s like together they make one functioning, composite adult.

 

To offer but one example; having a history in which regular mealtimes were a foreign concept, followed by them now playing a largely ceremonial role in the celebration of a case well-solved or a day otherwise well-survived, Dirk has a habit of forgetting to eat until food is quite literally placed under his nose. There are times Dirk has been sat at his desk opposite a client, fervently taking notes amidst a gripping discussion, where Todd has walked in and wordlessly removed the pen from his hand and replaced it with a hot dog. Normally he starts eating it, though one time he started trying to write with the mustard, albeit not unsuccessfully.

 

That said, their strengths play off one another. Dirk will occasionally take it upon himself to remind Todd to take his medication, something that Todd does almost every day without fail except, as fate would have it, on the days that Dirk happens to remember instead. So occasionally Todd will just absentmindedly be going about his life and then Dirk will fling himself through a doorway and tackle him to the floor while screeching ‘ _pill!_ ’ at the top of his lungs.

 

Essentially, Todd thinks he’s probably pretty fucked with respect to trying to accomplish an important life decision without Dirk’s informed involvement, even with Farah coaching or otherwise motivating him from the sidelines. So Todd gives himself a deadline - a random Saturday, just over two months after he first realized he had to do this, which is simultaneously a less-than-random Saturday, since it turns out to be the anniversary of Mona vanishing Dirk out of Blackwing into the trunk of a car, because that’s just how things work in the world, now.

 

Three days before this self-imposed doomsday, Amanda turns up at his door and loudly declares that she's taking him out for a drink. They go to a needlessly fruity cocktail bar in Seattle's trendiest district, which is full of fashionable young professionals drinking overpriced cocktails with impenetrable names.

 

She orders the Unicorn Liqueur Margarita, which turns out to be pink and thick and full of swirling silver microglitter. He orders some sort of tropical thing. It smells like a Jimmy Buffett song and has a slice of pineapple wedged onto the rim of the glass. Impaled into the pineapple is a sparkler and a small cocktail stick shaped like a flamingo. He wants to bring the flamingo home and give it to Dirk, because it might make him smile, which makes Todd also want to plant his face into the bar and never pick it up again.

 

They perch haphazardly on mismatched hairpin legged stools, their drinks on a fragile looking plexiglass table between them, both of which really add something to the atmosphere when Amanda asks if he's nervous.

 

"I -"

 

"That was a rhetorical question. I know you're nervous. Honestly, I just want to know why."

 

Todd's forehead wrinkles in confusion, but he looks at her flatly. "He might say no," he states, plainly. "That's like, the normal anxiety for people in my position."

 

Amanda cackles loudly. Todd flinches, eyes flicking down to the table. _Okay_ , he thinks. _Fair enough._

 

She raises her glass to her lips, still chuckling. Pink liquid sloshes around, and Todd draws his finger through the loose salt crystals littering the table top.

 

Then she's quiet, and the silence between the two of them suddenly feels heavy, even though there's nothing but noise pressing in from the room’s energetic crowd. Todd's eyes flick up instinctually, curious, but then he bobs his head down again when he meets Amanda's gaze.

 

"Wait - you think..." She's looking at him with open surprise. Quickly, something like sadness flicks across her face. Or maybe pity. Pity’s always a good option. He knows that one. After a long moment, though, her lips twinge up in a lopsided smile and her face softens. Setting aside the ugly pink glass, she takes his hand in both of hers. There's still salt stuck to his fingertips.

 

"He's going to say yes," Amanda says gently, like she's talking to a toddler. Or a small, easily frightened animal. "You - you do _know_ that, right?"

 

Todd doesn't know that.

 

"He's like, hundred percent going to say yes. Maybe ninety-five percent certainty, if I'm being pessimistic. Ninety-four percent? Ninety-three? No, ninety-three's way too low."

 

Privately, Todd thinks that's pretty generous, and that he'd actually put the real percentage at like. Fifty-five, max. It's a testament to the leaps and bounds his self esteem has developed during the last half a decade that he actually has the gall to put the odds even that significantly in his favor.

 

“He’s basically the best thing that ever happened to me,” Todd says. It feels confessional, though he knows she’s surmised as much due to her being present throughout the dumpster fire that was his twenties.

 

Amanda offers back, "I think Dirk came into your life for a reason.”

 

That chills him a little. It was what she said on that day, that first day before, or maybe it should be that first day _after_ , after things went bad but before they went worse. When she stood and looked at him and all his mistakes and told him just before she walked away that, hey, at least you’re being honest about it.

 

Todd is so, _so_ fucking glad he has her in his life. He’ll take her in whatever capacity she deigns to give him, all of which he is aware are far more than he deserves. They’re not like they were before, and they won’t ever be. And that’s okay, because Todd came to terms with that a long time ago, and because they’re good, now. Different-good, but still good-good nonetheless. And maybe a weird, fucked-up-but-almost-sort-of-better-good. Because now every moment feels like a genuine gift, like something he’s been handed gently to look after and collate and protect. Because there’s an openness between them, now, for better or worse, that Todd will die before he ever violates again. Because there’s starting from scratch and then there’s clawing your way from rock bottom up to the middle, and then starting from scratch from once you're _there_. Because he knows there’s a one strike policy and she’ll be gone, nothing but squealing tyres behind her.

 

He puts down his stupid pineapple drink, and grabs her hands back, and holds her desperately.

 

 

 

**-**

 

 

 

It rains. From the vantage point he had upon waking up, his boyfriend’s ice-cold toes pressed into his shins, to where he sits now having returned to bed, cradling hot mugs and warm toast and Dirk munching happily at his side, Todd can see Seattle’s signature rain coming down like curtain rails outside. He hopes that’s not the universe offering him some kind of warning, a pathetic fallacy played out in nature’s inexorable theatre.

 

Then the phone rings.

 

The thing about Dirk is that he's a holistic, because he is a holistic, and he's a detective, because he desperately wants to be a detective. He's combined them because it sounded better on the business cards. But in reality, this is no different than being a little kid who wanted to grow up and become a firefighter, and who happens to, say, sometimes accidentally conjure demons from some netherworld hellscape. They do not strictly relate to one another. Being a detective is a channel, a narrative stream he’s constructed to help hold everything and anything he is, but it is at the end of the day a job description. A moderately ill-fitting one. Dirk is a convergence of a lot of things, which makes it difficult to be a detective who can reliably solve actual crimes, when in reality the only things that he regularly ends up coming into contact with are anomalous crumples in the fabric of reality. Sometimes these fortuitously intersect with crimes, but seldom in the ways anyone might expect.

 

It'd be like the little kid who had wanted to be the firefighter growing up, transversing puberty, going to the fire service academy, graduating top of their class and learning how to slide down the pole, only for every other time the engine rolled up to the scene of a house fire for it to actually be full of the gaping tentacled maws of countless eldritch beings.

 

The firefighting skills might help, but they're certainly not the reason this problem has arisen in the first place.

 

So sometimes Dirk takes cases that start simple and end simple, that involve murders and infidelities and corporate fraudsters and a whole host of police procedural dramatics that almost make them feel like real detectives. On the other hand, they also end up taking cases that start simple, and devolve into grand capers involving multiple dimensions and reality bending manipulations of the universe's constancy of being, because that's just how it goes sometimes.

 

The call had been a redirect from the office, originating from a woman whose husband has been missing for two months now. She couldn't find any trace of him - his friends hadn't seen him, and he hadn't been to work. Hadn’t checked in online, either, and they hadn’t received any ransom calls.

 

Only, several hundred thousand dollars had, apparently quite literally, disappeared from the wife’s life savings in the last few months.

 

The police didn’t have any leads, their investigation beginning to stall out. Dirk had damn near rubbed his hands together in glee.

 

The first stop had been investigating the scene of the crime. That is to say, interviewing the wife, who was sweet and teary-eyed, and who sat through Dirk’s unorthodox approach to questioning with laudable aplomb and Kleenex in her clenched hands. An hour later, she showed them to the door with a wave and a watery smile.

 

About ten minutes after _that_ , Todd is crawling headfirst through her basement window. He falls, somersaulting ass over face, and somehow unexpectedly manages to land on his feet. “Huh,” he remarks, pleasantly surprised. He bounces on his feet a little, testing them. Dirk clatters down next to him from the same height, landing with his face planted firmly and inelegantly into the floor.

 

“That’s my guy,” Todd says, peeling him off the ground.

 

Dirk brushes the dirt off of his thighs, then draws himself up and visibly steels himself before stepping forward and launching into his spiel.

 

"Mrs. Wilks said that this was her husband's private study. She insisted no one should come down here, on his instruction, so logically it's the most likely place to find what he was up to, and where we might need to head next." Dirk's hands begin fluttering over papers at the desk directly in front of them, moving a mile a minute. Todd pans his phone's flashlight around the room.

 

"We're breaking and entering, right now." Todd says, dutifully. It feels important to note, for tradition's sake. "This is illegal."

 

Dirk turns to grin at him, a file clenched to his chest like a child's toy. "Then we better be quick about it, wouldn't you say?"

 

They split up. The study is formed from a small room who’s primary occupant appears to be have made a sincere if desperate effort to disguise the fact it is located in a damp and mildly slimy basement. The furniture is plush-looking, full of dark wood and rich colored fabrics. Not a scratch on it. Todd runs his finger along the back of the chair. “All this stuff is new,” he says.

 

"So is this." Dirk holds out a piece of paper. "It's some kind of contract. An investment deal, perhaps? This is a _very_ big number with a _lot_ of zeros, Todd.“

 

Todd plucks it from his hands and scans the document. One name jumps out, heading the page and repeated throughout. “ _Promenade W_?” he questions.

 

Nodding, Dirk urges him on. "I _think_ that it’s the new place they were building out west, in Admiral. Across the water.“ He talks about Seattle with practiced ease, and not at all like someone who one time asked for directions to the Space Needle while he stood directly in front of it. Seattle is his home, now, and it still makes Todd’s heart skip. ”It opens this week, they mentioned it on the radio this morning. Developers tore down a number of buildings predating 1900 and apparently that made a lot of people _very_ angry, though I will say that my university dining hall probably had cutlery older than that. But, granted, that’s neither here nor there.”

 

Todd takes the high road. “What is it?”

 

“Haven’t the foggiest. Offices? Shops, I think?” He squints at a laminated brochure he’s plucked from the pile, raising it up to his face. There’s a picture of an attractive high rise development in the middle of carefully landscaped gardens. A short set of gray stone steps lead up to glass doors at the front of a high-rise building.

 

It hits Todd like a bolt of electricity. "Holy shit! Holy shit, Dirk, we saw it! We saw it, remember?! We were _there_! With the -“

 

He makes an excited wiggly hand gesture.

 

Dirk slowly mirrors the gesture, face looking indulgently bemused for a few seconds before enlightenment flashes over his featured and he gasps. He snaps his fingers quickly, _one-two-three_. "With the wormhole!"

 

“Yes! With the wormhole! Jesus, I can’t believe we were there.” By this point, he certainly should. Todd feels himself physically repressing the urge to remark on the interconnectedness of things. Instead he supplies, “So much for statistically unlikely, right?”

 

They turn back to the desk, taking in the fanned out array of papers. "There's a _lot_ of stuff here for it. Wilks must have been involved in the development."

 

When he spins back, Dirk is looking at a different file. “So if that's that address, then what is this one?”

 

"Huh?"

 

“There’s this other address here, on the form, see? Shareholder’s address. Wilks, then this one, here,” he says, tapping his finger eagerly on a printed line. Todd squints at it, then reaches out to steady Dirk’s hand, and then squints a little less.

 

"Wait, I just saw that too. Hang on." Todd goes back over to the desk, and casts his hands out over the debris. Then they sidle back together and hold the two next to each other, as if they were piecing together a treasure map, or one of those two-piece best friend necklaces.

 

The addresses match, from the form in Dirk’s hand to the business card in Todd’s. It’s printed on expensive looking cream-colored cardstock, stamped only with an address downtown and the moderately descriptive moniker ‘ _Investment & Sales’. _Todd flips the card over, but the back is blank. “Not much to go on.”

 

Dirk hums, eyes still squinting at the paper in his hand as if it will offer further enlightenment on greater scrutiny. “Maybe not,” he says eventually, “but there’s at least a direct connection to _Promenade W_. Regardless of how pretentious it may sound.”

 

“Want to head there first?”

 

His eyes shine. “I _promise_ we’ll stay away from the elevator shaft this time.”

 

 

 

**-**

 

 

 

The first suggestions of evening are falling, thick and quiet, by the time they make it to _Promenade W._ The part of Todd which has never entirely acquired Dirk’s optimistic view of the universe would go so far as to call it bordering on too quiet. The air seems sluggish, humid outside with the heat, and Todd is all too grateful to leave it behind by the time they duck back inside the foyer of a building they’d been all too unceremoniously turfed out of a month prior.

 

The reception desk is empty this time, but the glow of light from under a door suggests a guard might be otherwise waiting in their office. That might pass for weird, if Todd weren’t looking over the directory on the wall and noticing that almost all the rooms and levels still appear to be unoccupied. So perhaps there isn’t much footfall through yet. It certainly doesn’t look like it - the room is deserted, untouched and pristine and looking like something out of a catalogue. It’s good that they don’t much go in for the traditional detective work, because Todd guesses you could probably fingerprint this whole room and come up empty.

 

Todd is still scanning through the surprisingly short reel of names when he first picks up on it. It’s like a tiny high-pitched whistle, like the kind that you hear when you’re younger but that tend to stop bothering you by the time you near forty. But just like those feelings, it’s accompanied by this tickle of discomfort. Todd feels it in the back of his neck. He turns to Dirk, who meets his eyes and cautiously lowers the throw pillow he’d been looking underneath.

 

There’s a slow spreading, indescribable feeling of malaise, of _wrongness_ that shivers through him in the same sort of way that you experience déjà vu. Dirk is wearing a fearful expression that curdles something in Todd’s gut, and that suggests that he’s probably feeling the same thing. All the time, the sound is growing, getting louder without ever getting deeper, just piercing higher and higher. It’s deafening now, a roaring high-pitched whine.

 

Inexplicably, Todd thinks it sounds as if something is shrinking, like helium escaping from inside a balloon. He looks to Dirk.

 

"I think," Dirk declares loudly, "we should possibly run."

 

They run.

 

As they step over the threshold, the building vanishes from behind them with a squeaky _pop_.

 

“Right then," remarks Dirk thirty seconds later, from where he lies panting on the ground. He sounds somewhat phased - Todd had bodily thrown himself from the building's steps and had taken Dirk down with him, hitting the ground hard on his left side and punching the air out of his lungs in the process. Everything hurts. His face is pressed down into cool, damp grass. He flails his hand out to his right in a jerky, aborted arc until he connects with what he assumes is Dirk's shoulder. He squeezes it. Dirk makes a soft noise in his throat, and a moment later Todd feels Dirk's long fingers press over his own in a small, reassuring pat.

 

He retracts the arm. Todd winces as he then gingerly levers himself up onto his elbows. Something feels rough under his palms - he looks down, and sees his pale arms covered in the rough grit of builders sand. Weird. Then he twists around, pulling his gaze upwards, and sees that the area around them is no longer manicured into the soft landscaped waves they passed through when they entered. Instead the ground is carved open, potholed and mottled, with huge expanses of the surprisingly luminous bright orange sand spreading out over a patchwork of uneven turf and dotted with piles of abandoned rubble and tile. Off to the left there's a concrete mixer.

 

Conspicuously, there's also not a skyscraper there anymore.

 

"Um," says Todd. He looks down to where Dirk, still laying flat on his back, has his neck craned up to stare rapt at the space previously occupied by a very large and now apparently absent building.

 

"Quite." Dirk hasn't broken his gaze with the empty air. Todd pokes him in the ribs and he turns, eyes wide. "So, the second address, would you say?”

 

 

 

**-**

 

 

 

So - they go to the second address.

 

It’s an office building downtown, the suite number turning out to correspond not quite to the penthouse, but not far off from it either. In a beautifully symmetrical moment, Dirk peruses the directory next to the elevator while Todd stands next to him, nodding at and making awkward eye contact with a sceptical looking lady sat behind the front desk. Dirk rights himself, apparently having gathered all the information he cares to, before he follows Todd’s line of sight and waves cheerfully at the receptionist.

 

He bundles them into the elevator, and lets Dirk use his newfound knowledge to stab confidently at the floor number.

 

As they step out into the reception area of the suite, Todd is instantly overwhelmed by how _expensive_ it all looks. The room is sleek and modern, everything glinting with polished chrome edges. There’s a small recessed area in the floor, housing a coffee table and a set of armchairs in rich buttery-looking leather, and one of those obnoxiously large floor lamps that’s meant to look like a desk light. Then behind, up on a raised step, there’s a sleek glass desk with the curved edges, with a tall high-backed chair.

 

Two seconds after they step through the door, the chair turns, because Todd’s life is exactly that kind of bad direct-to-television drama. A woman spins into view and she steeples her fingers - her skin a cool-toned beige, set against the dramatic sweeping waves of a rich velvet dress patterned in green. Her hair falls, slick sheets of black, to frame her face and fierce, dark-lined eyes.

 

Despite everything else going on, Todd dedicates half a thought to feeling somewhat underdressed.

 

“I’d say that I was wondering when you would arrive, Dirk Gently. But that wouldn’t be quite true, for I happened to know just _exactly_ when you’d step through that door - and I’ve been waiting.” Her voice is smooth, haughty and polished.

 

“Who are you?”

 

“Just consider me an interested party,” she says, rising from her desk. She steps around it towards them, trailing her fingers across the surface as she moves. Her moves look calculated, predatory and at ease. Todd is reminded of how tigers stalk the boundaries of their enclosures. “Interested in results. Interested in prosperity, and wellbeing. Interested -“

 

Stomach somersaulting, Todd watches as she lazily fixes her gaze on Dirk.

 

“In you.”

 

Todd, because he has had the pleasure of knowing Farah for several years, points a gun at her.

 

Dirk, looking askance, hisses, “ _Todd!_ ”

 

"Hey hey, woah, _no no no!_ Don’t, please!” Her voice is suddenly different, urgent, all the frigid elegance dropped and instead sounding rounded out. With a start, Todd realizes she's British, too. British, and fucking terrified. Her step falters, falling back against her desk as her hands fly up. "My whole thing works by avoiding conflict, you know? I don't actually know how to do this, oh shit, for real, please don't shoot me!"

 

“I’m holding the gun,” says Todd, deliberately, wiggling it a little to illustrate, “and I was taught how to use it by a very good shot. So think really carefully how you want to answer the question, okay? Who are you?”

 

She wrings her hands, looking nervous. Despite the ludicrous suite, and the dress that probably costs more than Todd’s rent, in this moment she just looks like a scared young woman. She comes forward, down the step, and her intimidating figure loses a good six inches. She starts talking in a soft, earnest tone, and he cautiously lowers the gun. “My name is Lin, okay? And like I said, I really am just an interested party. An investor, like, a kind of special one? And I really do know who you are, Dirk, honest.”

 

Lin follows it with what she probably intends to be a reassuring face. Dirk, stiffening at Todd’s side, does not seem relaxed.

 

“How?” Dirk asks, simply, his voice cool.

 

“I - this probably sounds crazy? Or maybe not, to you. So, you know what parallel universes are, right? What am I saying, you’ve seen movies, yeah, okay. So whenever you, or me, or anyone makes the _tiniest_ decision, there are countless different ways the situation can play out, right? See, I can kind of, like, _see_ those possibilities. I can visualise every outcome of every choice, billions and billions of them all spinning out, and I can figure out how likely each one is to happen. I know the odds. And then I can act on it, or - or I manipulate chance and likelihood to my will.“ Lin winces. “Okay, no, that sounds like garbage. Sorry, I think I’m still in sales mode? Buyers like the whole purple prose talk thing. Think - think of it like stacking the deck, or ever so slightly nudging the roulette wheel. I can't _make_ myself win. But I can tip the scale, you know? Play the odds, to help get the outcome I want.“

 

“But you - you can see what happens? You can see the future?”

 

" _Pfft_ , no - I'm not a psychic, alright? That's not how it works. I like to think of myself as a gambler. A holistic gambler. Someone who understands the fundamental interconn-"

 

"Interconnectedness of all things, yeah, we got it," says Todd.

 

"Yes." Lin puffs a sharp breath out her nose, and levels her gaze at Dirk. On a more intimidating figure it might look venomous, but instead she just gives off an aura of intense frustration. "Yeah, I think you probably do."

 

Dirk looks over his shoulder, then down at himself, then back up at her. "What? _Me_?"

 

" _You!_  You are the single greatest thorn in my side, Dirk Gently, and one I can do absolutely nothing about. You're like-" she makes an inarticulate noise, accompanied by balling her hands into little fists. Given her stature, it’s quite endearing. "Every decision is a pebble, right, that sends out waves across a pond? And everything in the pond follows the ripples. Everything except you, that is, because somehow it's like you're the only one with a boat. You still get to go wherever you want, or you stay anchored, like a fixed point, and everything else just sort of… moves _around_ you."

 

"My connection with the universe,” Dirk mumbles to himself.

 

She carries on, excitedly talking over him, hands moving to her hair. "No matter what I do, you just do your own thing! And, trust me, I've tried basically _everything_! Just, nothing _sticks_ on you!" Todd gets the impression she's kind of grateful for the opportunity just to vent her frustration to someone.

 

"That's why you were scared we'd shoot you," he says, realisation hitting. "Because you can't do anything about it."

 

"I mean, I had a pretty decent idea that you wouldn't," she says, raising a finger to tap her temple, a wry expression settling comfortable on her face. "But there's always a chance."

 

Todd’s a little fearful when he asks, “What do - what do you _do_ , with a power like that?”

 

He’s picturing a woman with the power to manipulate chance, who could bend lawmakers and warmongers to her very will, who could start a global sociopolitical conflict if she ever felt so inclined.

 

“I make it so that cats on the street will let me pet them.” She looks rueful. “I know what you’re thinking, okay? I’m not a monster, honestly. Like I said, I’m an investor. People pay me a commission - and a percentage share of profits over a fixed term contract, duh - and I’ll tell them the best way game whatever kind of system they’re interested in, and then I’ll bend the odds for them, whether they want to climb into a position of power, or come into money, or - no, no it’s pretty much exclusively those two things, now I come to think about it.”

 

Halfway through her monologue, Lin flops down onto a chaise, with considerably less grace than she was displaying when they first entered. Her dress poofs up around her, and she fights down through the layers to reach and tug her heeled boots off. Underneath are fluffy, striped socks. 

 

Wiggling her toes, comfortable, she continues. “I never do anything too fucky with it, like, I want to live in an apocalyptic wasteland as much as the next person. I’ve seen _Back To The Future 2,_ okay? I _know_ how likely that’d be when I meet a person and see whatever decision they’re talking about. Everything's connected, and all that. And anyway - all the outcomes, they’re all things that _could_ happen regardless, so morally it’s maybe a bit gray, but definitely not too far on the bad-bad side, I don’t think? I've thought about it a lot. It might sound impossible, but, honestly, I really try to make it so I only get the good outcomes. For, like, everyone."

 

Softly but emphatically, Dirk says, “ _Solved it_.” Todd’s heart clenches.

 

“You get it, right? You saw the papers and stuff.“ Lin looks reassured. “Anyway, yeah, when I saw what Wilks was doing, nah, I wasn’t there for that, that wasn’t part of the deal. He was a shit. He crossed me when he crossed his family, and stole from them, so I crossed him back. Took away what I gave him - he’s none the wiser, and everyone who is even tangentially involved is exactly where they’d have been otherwise, and now a nice lady has a full bank account again, and there’s back to being a whole nice area of unsold real estate out in Admiral all ready and waiting for some new developer to take a shot at it. Hopefully this one won’t use so many of those fake columns. They’re so tacky.”

 

Todd feels rather like he’s suddenly begun speaking a different language to everyone else.

 

“So we… found the husband?”

 

Dirk shakes his head, eyes bright and shining, hands hovering around Todd’s frame like they do when he’s excited. “No, Todd, don’t you see? He was never missing! Now - _then_ , six months ago, back then he never made those deals we saw, and he never chose to invest in the development. If we called his wife, she wouldn’t have the foggiest idea what we were talking about, and neither would he!”

 

Todd screws up his face, and turns back to Lin, who has moved to sit down at the desk again. “So you just - what? Hit ‘undo’ on his decision?”

 

She nods, and crunches something in her mouth. “Pretty much. I made it so the odds of him having picked what he was gunning for became miniscule. He didn’t make the right choice, so the outcome changed.” She extends a small bowl in his direction. “Jordan almond?”

 

Todd declines. ”But what about the whole… butterfly thing?"

 

"It doesn't work like that," she replies, flippant. Of course it doesn't. "At least, not for you lot."

 

Todd, who resents being part of ‘you lot’, decides to ask what she means.

 

"I guess whatever this is - " Lin pauses to punctuate the statement by gesturing to encompass Dirk, and Todd hears him whisper “ _'this'?”_ under his breath, affronted " - that it kind of has a proximity effect? You, and the others like you and me, and your friends, you're all harder to manipulate. Not that I like, _try_.”

 

She casts another nervous glance at the gun Todd is still holding. He hastens to put it away, and she softens, surprised and genuine. It’s an innocent little smile, full of disbelief, like she wasn’t expecting something to happen to pull it into creation. He used to see it on Dirk, in the early days. Now it reminds him most of Bart, smiling at doughnuts or pink coats or pink princes in a tiny jail cell.

 

“Cheers. Anyway, yeah - I gave up on trying to influence anything even remotely adjacent to you guys ages ago. But even when I change other stuff, you don't seem to get buffeted about by the ripples as much?“

 

Dirk asks what she means, cautious but almost visibly vibrating with curiosity. The smile on Lin’s face grows, still appearing to be mostly genuine, with a little fierce undercurrent that Todd would generously hazard to call ‘shit stirring’.

 

“I can follow any thread, into any universe - from the smallest action to the biggest, I can see how any one thing can change everything else, right? Well, not to, like, rip the rug out from you or anything - but you were always going to end up here.” Dirk goes to open his mouth reflexively, but clamps it shut again with a sound when Lin elaborates. “I don’t mean _here-_ here. Just - I’ve looked directly into something like several thousand million potential maybe-futures diverting from our own, and I’ve never once seen one where you two don’t end up meeting. It’s not always the same way, like, I don’t think you always end up working together. And I guess you maybe don’t always, like, get _together_ -together. But like I said - the ripples never take you far, not from each other.”

 

Without prompting, Todd’s mind conjures the image of a comet, pulled in by the tight grip of gravity, always falling towards a perpetual center. Or twin stars, sharing a binary orbit, inseparably combined and spinning like two atoms in a molecule.

 

“Please,” says Dirk, his face doing a very Dirk-like thing while his eyes move to hold on Todd’s, “explain that again. Using some different words. I’d just like to make sure I really get it, if you don’t mind.”

 

Lin, voice sincere and turned almost shy for a moment, tucks a lock of hair behind her ear. “Excepting for the ones where we all get burned up in a nuclear apocalypse? There’s literally no version, not in a infinite number of possible realities, where Todd Brotzman and Dirk Gently didn’t somehow end up together.”

 

There is - unexpectedly, and despite the literally world-altering truths discussed in the preceding few minutes and the myriad of ways in which they could be investigated further - what could possibly be described as an awkward pause. Todd desperately wrestles back the sudden urge to clear his throat.

 

Dirk looks at Lin curiously. "Where are you from, originally?”

 

"Singapore."

 

His expression turns into one that's trying for dry, but on Dirk always just looks like he's not angry at you, he's just disappointed. "That wasn't what I meant, and you know it."

 

She cracks a grin. "Norfolk."

 

"Oh," says Dirk. His tone of voice implies this to be unfortunate. "What brought you to America?"

 

She shows more teeth, looking devious. "High rollers."

 

"You weren't scared of Blackwing catching up with you?" asks Todd, curious if not concerned. His eyes slide over to Dirk beside him. The gun in his pocket feels heavy.

 

Lin shakes her head. Her earrings, long and encrusted with numerous diamonds, catch the light. "Nah. Any time anybody gets close, I just push myself towards a future where it doesn’t happen." She shrugs, casually dislodging the strap of her dress.

 

She doesn’t make any move to pick it back up. Todd decides that, as long as she doesn’t obliquely threaten anyone else he cares about, he likes her immensely.

 

“Are you…” he hazards, “okay?”

 

Lin blinks in surprise. She looks sort of pleased. “Me? I’m peachy. Can’t knock me down.”

 

“Oh. Okay. Good.” Todd falters then decides he didn’t get this far by half-assing situations, especially when it comes to, like, being nice to people. “You can call us if you have any trouble with - stuff?” He didn’t mean it to come out sounding like a question, but he sees Lin nod in response anyway.

 

She seems relaxed when she speaks. “Try to avoid mentioning the old development, if you could, yeah? I like to stay away from attention as much possible. It gets confusing. No one else should remember the previous universe, except a few people who’re really tapped into that kind of thing. Your friend might, I’m not sure. You’ll just look sort of bonkers to anyone else.”

 

“We are intimately familiar with that sensation already, Lin, but thank you for the warning nonetheless,” replies Dirk.

 

They swap phone numbers and say their final goodbyes, Dirk offering a little wave as they head out. Two steps from the elevator, Todd pauses and considers, only for a split second, about asking Lin - something. The obvious thing. He shakes his head, dismissing the thought as if he’s clearing an Etch-a-Sketch. Then he considers if she saw a universe where he did it, anyway.

 

Only a moment later, she calls after him, his unasked questions answered twofold. He turns.

 

“Hey! Todd!" she shouts, leaning forward over the desk, propped up on arms with elbows locked in childlike glee. "Your odds are pretty good, so don't worry about it, okay? Just don't screw it up!"

 

After a short elevator ride, Todd steps out through the foyer, into a cool evening where he finds himself stood under the building's front awning in a different version of reality than the one that he woke in this morning. Trying to calmly take this in his stride, Todd elects to check his phone.

 

 _9:35pm_ glows the display. In the last several hours, he’s also accrued a number of texts. There’s one from Amanda from just after noon which simply reads ‘ _Good luck ;)’_ , as well as a time series from Farah which span the gulf between ‘ _Make sure to give the waiter the rings before_ _you sit down okay’_ and _‘???????’_ to _‘Holy fuck have you found the guy bc a building just disappeared’_.

 

He looks up. Dirk has his tongue out in concentration. He's toying with the zip on his jacket, the original old yellow one, fastening it against the encroaching evening. Todd stares at him, at his fluffed-up hair and his crooked tie, and his whole body is flooded with loving him. The air feels light and fresh, the weight of any humidity lifted by the morning’s rain.

 

“Come for a walk with me.”

 

“Why?”

 

Todd smiles.

 

“I’ve got a good feeling.”

 

Dirk looks thoughtful. "You know what?” he says, with sudden conviction. “So do I.”

 

 

 

**-**

 

 

 

They walk aimlessly for a while, content.

 

Slowly they make their way north along Alaskan, by the waterfront, to see the fish places with their striped cladding shut up tightly for the night, neon still illuminated and flickering. The tourist traps still have their window displays lit, too, and they pause at every one to point inside.  

 

It's late in the summer by now - evenings are crisp and cold, the trees that line the street just beginning to turn, but the days remain long as sunset hangs stubbornly in the air. The lights circle lazily on the Ferris wheel. There are people out and about still, making their way home or just headed out in dancing clothes, but the sidewalks are wide enough that Todd and Dirk dodge them as one entity, hands swinging between them.

 

Dirk nods his head towards Seattle Aquarium as they pass. There’s a large billboard poster with a shark on it. Solemnly, he says, “Look, Todd, a kitten,” and Todd nearly laughs himself sick.

 

He’d been intending to guide them up to where the parks start, and there’s long strips of greenery with a slope down to the shoreline. It’d seemed like a nice idea.

 

But, just now, they pass by the old pier. It's broad, made of wood warped and bleached by exposure to decades of salt, and strung with amber colored lights. Normally it’d be packed with people watching the water and the slow, churning passage of the boats nearby. Tonight, it's absolutely deserted.

 

Dirk tugs them out, and they meander to the railings. The smell of the bay against the damp wood is heady. In the sky, the haze of the day’s earlier cloud never entirely cleared, even despite the downpour. Instead, thin whisps of cloud blur dusk out to the very edges of the horizon, spreading the sunset fingers like a smeared pastel drawing. Normally, thinking about piers and Dirk in the same context leaves a leaden weight of guilt sitting in his stomach. Now, it feels relevant. Feels connected.

 

It feels perfect.

 

Todd drops Dirk’s hand. Dirk turns to him, looking puzzled. He’s backlit by the sun. His hand twitches out towards Todd’s again, and Todd shoves both into his jacket pockets before he loses his nerve.

 

"I was going to take us out to dinner this evening. I had this whole thing planned, we were going to go to one of Farah's fancy places, and it was going to be elegant, and sophisticated, and-" Todd replays the last several hours, from where they'd received a run-of-the-mill sounding phone call to when they’d sprinted away from a billion imploding universes, breathlessly howling laughter, Todd at Dirk’s heels like always. "And you know what? I think this ended up being a lot more _us_."

 

Todd grins. Dirk matches it, albeit looking a little lost.

 

"What just happened was _insane_. Entirely insane. And what's more insane, is the fact that I now get to spend the rest of my life knowing it happened and trying to deal with that. Like, I guarantee you that in five years time we'll be in Safeway picking up milk and I'm suddenly going to remember that one time I ended up meeting a woman who knew how every single possible version of my life could have turned out in an infinite number of parallel universes, and then I'm going to just have to pick up the 2% and try to walk away like a normal person. And maybe once I wouldn't have - _didn't_ \- want that, because it meant the world is bigger and scarier than I ever could've imagined."

 

It’d been easier to say the words looking out over the water, and just feeling Dirk’s presence at his side. But now he needs him to see, to _understand_. He turns, and meets bright, shining eyes.

 

“But I’m not scared anymore.”

 

He draws his hands out of his pockets, and takes Dirk’s in his. They’re shaking, faintly. Todd tries to keep the wobble out of his own voice as he continues.

 

"I didn’t use to believe in anything, and then I met you. And now I believe in _everything_. Including myself, maybe, sometimes. But mostly you. Always, _always_ you. I used to wonder what would've happened if we'd never met - but it turns out that was never even a possibility, was it? You and me, some sort of universal constant." He squeezes the fingers wrapped tight inside his own. "You changed my life, Dirk. And I want you to keep on changing it - forever, if you’ll have me.”

 

Todd - because at no point since he threw in his lot and his life and his heart and his shoe with this ridiculous man has he ever received any benefit from doing things halfway - eases down onto one knee.

 

"Dirk Gently," he asks, heart in his throat, "will you marry me?"

 

Dirk's throat works, silently, for a second. He nods. Once, slowly and carefully. A firm, declarative ‘yes’. Something fragile in Todd’s chest shivers. Then Dirk nods again, and again and again and again in increasingly desperate little bobbles. A small bright laugh bubbles out of him.

 

His eyes have that wet shine of wonder and Todd thinks, with vicious joy, _mine_.

 

He tries to haul Todd up, long fingers around Todd's biceps, but Todd's declarative kneel puts him off balance. So Dirk tugs, but Todd topples, and Dirk doesn’t let go. He doesn’t let go, and they fall into a heap on the damp decking, legs entangled and hands grabbing whatever they can touch. Dirk is still laughing wetly as he seals his lips over Todd's in a firm kiss.

 

They’ve kissed countless times before. For all that the sensation is as familiar as coming home, each one feels a little new, a little different. This one feels like _possibility._

 

Todd pulls away to breathe, and to explain.

 

"I do have rings.”

 

Dirk brightens, if such a thing were possible. “Oh good! I wasn’t going to say anything.” His voice sounds more than a little unsteady.

 

“Yeah, well. I left them in my other jacket. It was - we had a busy day?”

 

“You forgot a time machine once, too.”

 

“Forget my own head, next.” Todd is so breathlessly happy that he thinks he might combust from the sheer intensity of it, as if the human body simply wasn’t made to hold this much love.

 

Dirk presses in for another kiss. His nose is cold against Todd’s cheek. “Nah,” he says, “I’ll help you remember that one. Quite fond of it, in all honesty.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so, so much for taking the time to read this silly fic - it means the absolute world to me! This is the first story that I've properly worked on in years, but I really just wanted to put something out there for a show and a fandom that has been so brilliant and brought such utter joy to me in such a short time. 
> 
>  
> 
> Thank you to everyone who has made the _DGHDA_ experience so one-of-a-kind, especially to [fuming-on-the-sidelines](http://fuming-on-the-sidelines.tumblr.com/) who was the world's most kind and wonderful beta. ❤
> 
>  
> 
> Please let me know what you think, and feel free to follow me on tumblr at [shortcrust](http://shortcrust.tumblr.com/) for more of this sort of nonsense! 
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> **References/visuals:**  
>  \- Title from Frank Sinatra's [_Love & Marriage_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRDBvKGc1fE).
> 
>    
> \- Todd and Dirk’s engagement rings are intended to be this [_toi et moi_ ring](https://imgur.com/a/ed76r) from the early 1900s, because I thought it was ever so pretty, and that it sort of looked like the Leaves of Lórien and I couldn’t pass up such an opportunity.
> 
>    
> \- Lin’s dress is [Number 23 from Georges Chakra’s 2017/18 F/W](https://imgur.com/a/QS2Qsjz) collection. I would happily die in this dress. Lin pairs hers with long black velvet boots, as we should all aspire to.
> 
> \- Classic comedy and truly timeless fashion from [_Ab Fab_](https://youtu.be/7FVMhJef9is?t=1m38s).
> 
>    
> \- [Captain Holt's little desk rainbow flag](https://twitter.com/brooklyn99fox/status/918254733109764097).
> 
>    
> \- To quote [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_\(unit\)), ‘A helen is a humorous unit of measurement based on the concept that Helen of Troy, from the Iliad, had a "face that launched a thousand ships". The helen is thus used to measure quantities of beauty in terms of the theoretical action that could be accomplished by the wielder of such beauty.’ 
> 
>    
> \- I put together the playlists which I mentioned the boys making for each other, with Dirk's Side A feat. Shaun Wasabi and Walk The Moon, and Todd's Side B feat. The Front Bottoms and Sledding With Tigers, the latter of which have a whole EP about _Space Jam_. I called it ‘Do You Want To Be My / Sunshine’, and you [can listen to it on Spotify.](https://open.spotify.com/user/polychromator/playlist/5gvRY0zn0ugaJ4QRSwRExk?si=ySS9j0dHR8CqSUHFyA0jPw)
> 
>    
> \- [Seattle’s Pier 62/63.](https://imgur.com/a/zy04g)


End file.
